by John Jakes
Huntoon was willing to take certain risks to establish himself. All during the final tiresome leg of their journey, from Columbus, Georgia, to Montgomery, he had been writing a memorial to the Confederate Congress. The thrust of it was an attack on the conservatism of the Confederacy’s provisional constitution. In language and scope, it was remarkably close to the old Constitution, except that slavery was protected. But, rather remarkably, the new constitution prohibited the African slave trade. That provision definitely had to be changed.
Huntoon’s memorial also called for the new confederation to name itself the United States of America, thus demonstrating to the world that it represented the one true constitutional government on the continent. He argued that the Yankees were the ones who had perverted the principles of the Founding Fathers.
At the moment he was stuck on the conclusion. He had written, “We must prove that an aristocracy can govern better than a mob,” but he could go no further. Perhaps it was the sight of his wife that distracted him and barred the smooth flow of words.
Ashton was leaning against the interior wall, gazing out the window at the pleasant cotton fields through which the road twisted and dipped. Despite dust and the general disarray produced by travel, she looked extremely fetching, Huntoon thought. He felt a physical response and recalled that it had been more than a month since he had been permitted to enjoy intimate relations. She didn’t seem to need that from their marriage any longer.
He cleared his throat. “My dear? I’ve run aground. Perhaps you can help me frame a felicitous conclusion.”
He held out the last of several closely written sheets. Pouting, she batted it away.
“I’m not interested in all that silly jibber-jabber, Jamie.”
Under the desk his rigidity wilted. From his expression, she decided she had stung him a little too hard. She leaned over to allow him to feel her tightly bound breast against his sleeve.
“Montgomery will be a wonderful experience for us. What matters isn’t the verbiage, the philosophy, but the power we—you can accumulate and use. We waited a long time for this opportunity. We mustn’t fritter it away on useless exercises.”
She had grown excited; the thought of power always had that effect. If her husband didn’t climb as high or as swiftly as she thought he should, there would certainly be others in Montgomery worthy of her consideration. In Montgomery or Richmond, she amended silently; there was already widespread talk about the capital soon being moved out of the cotton belt to Virginia.
The conversation, as well as a long period of self-denial following Forbes’s untimely death, had built tension within Ashton. Even if she didn’t like her husband very much, he could be used to relieve it.
“Jamie, Jamie—put that silly paper away. Can’t you see I’ve been missing your company terribly?”
“You have? I hardly noticed.”
His cynicism was only a momentary pose. With a touch of her hand, she brought him to impatient tumidity. Ashton was a little surprised at the suddenness and intensity of her own desire.
He forced her over against the opposite seat, one hand constricting on her breasts, one groping up her leg beneath her skirts. Dreadful, crude man, she thought. But he would serve. She closed her eyes and imagined a gala ball at which she was presented to President Davis, who was utterly charmed by her intelligence and beauty.
As the coach labored on, Rex scratched his head and leaned out to one side. He was intensely curious about the cause of so many loud creaks and cries from within. But, alas, the angle was wrong; he couldn’t see a thing.
That same night, Elkanah Bent stood at the bar in Willard’s Hotel.
He was sipping whiskey while he totted up figures on a scrap of paper.
He was pleased by the final sum. After paying the tailor’s bill for his new uniforms, he would have just enough left to lease the small flat he had found. Many good houses and apartments had become available in Washington recently; scores of traitorous officers and bureaucrats were fleeing home to the South.
It behooved him to occupy better quarters than a hotel room. His influential friends had secured him a brevet to full colonel, a promotion not at all unusual for a career officer in these days of frenzied preparation for war. Bent only hoped the war would last longer than a few months. Some predicted it would not. General Scott made frequent reference to “the fatal incapacity of the Southerners for agreeing or working together.” He said it would adversely affect military performance.
Well, time enough to worry about that. Tonight he wanted to celebrate. A fine meal, then an hour’s companionship. He would need to make credit arrangements for the latter, however. He knew one sordid black brothel where it was possible.
He was exalted by thoughts of the coming conflict. Blood would run. Thousands and thousands would die. He rejoiced at this long-overdue chance to display his skills and earn the reputation—the glory—he knew to be his just portion.
And along the way he might be able to settle some old scores.
He would never get over botching the attempt in Texas. And now that damned Charles Main had defected to the South like so many other dishonorable soldiers whose actions made them deserving of a firing squad. But war had a curious way of twisting fates and fortunes. Who knew but what this one might bring him an opportunity to strike directly at the Mains. He mustn’t forget they were somehow connected with a woman attempting to pass herself off as white, a woman who was not only a nigger but the offspring of a New Orleans whore.
As for Billy Hazard, surely he would be able to keep track of him. The young engineering officer was remaining on active duty. Bent had already ascertained that at the adjutant general’s office. He’d get the lot of them, both families. He believed that because of another conviction he held—neither the Mains nor the Hazards would suspect that his desire for revenge could survive in the chaos that was surely ahead. Their stupidity was his trump card.
He finished his whiskey and called for another. He admired his uniform in the mirror behind the bar. He became aware of two men next to him who were engaged in loud conversation. One was arguing that a reconstruction plan should be prepared and publicized immediately, to encourage the South to return to the fold.
Bent slammed his glass on the bar. “If you believe that, sir, you belong on the other side of the Potomac.”
The man was eager to debate. “I take issue, sir. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself stated that mercy—”
“No mercy,” Bent interrupted. “No quarter. Never.”
A few listeners cheered. The argumentative man took note of the unpopularity of his view and said no more.
Bent preened in front of the mirror. What a splendid day this had been. A man was lucky to live in a time of war.
War. Was there a sweeter, more delicious word in all of the English language? He felt so fine that he left a whole twenty-five cents for the barman.
He strutted out of the hotel, enjoying one of his favorite thoughts. Bent and Bonaparte began with the same letter. It was not a trivial coincidence. By God, no. It had immense historical significance. Before long the world would appreciate that.
A few days later, in the Blue Ridge foothills near Harpers Ferry, Virgilia visited Grady’s unmarked grave.
It was a sweet, warm April afternoon. She had driven from the railway station in a hired buggy, which she had pulled to the side of the dirt road at the foot of a low hill covered with maples. She had tied the horse to a branch, walked halfway up, and dropped to her knees beside a mound surrounded by trees.
“Oh, Grady. Grady.”
She fell forward on the new grass covering the mound. She had dug the grave, filled it, and piled up the earth with her own hands. In the confusion just prior to Brown’s capture, she had crept into Harpers Ferry, located Grady’s body, and hidden it. Not long afterward, one of the other conspirators, a Negro woman, had helped her move it here, where no one would dig it up and desecrate it.
Brown was gone now, his dream of a
glorious revolt dying with him on the gallows. Grady was gone too. But their blood-price had bought a great gift: the war. Fighting had not yet started, but she was convinced it soon would. She reveled in the thought as she lay with her thighs and breasts crushed against the mound, as if it were Grady’s living flesh.
She imagined rows and rows of Southern corpses with heads gone, stumps of arms gushing blood, holes where the genitals had been. She moaned and trembled as she thought of the coming epiphany of her cause. There would be work for her, bloody work others were too scrupulous or fainthearted to perform.
But she would perform it. She would answer the call of her own hatred of those who enslaved others, those who enslaved beautiful black men. She had left her family, insufferable moralizing prigs, forever. She had cut herself off from humanity and now lived solely for her memories and one companion:
Death, who was her friend and God’s righteous instrument.
At Mont Royal, shadows seemed longer, the spring nights darker, than ever before. Orry had no interest in planting and husbanding a rice crop, nor had he any confidence in Jeff Davis’s announced plan to use cotton to win European recognition of the Confederacy. In his opinion, Davis was a damn fool. The European market was glutted with cotton. Who would care if the South withheld its crop?
A strange impulse for change was stirring in Orry these days. He was restless in the familiar rooms, the old grooves. Only Madeline’s presence and the easy way she fitted herself into his life made existence bearable.
Confusion and doubt seemed to be his lot. One night, sleepless, he went browsing in the library. He pulled out a volume he hadn’t looked at in years. It was Notes on the State of Virginia, the only book ever written by Thomas Jefferson.
He hitched up his nightshirt and sat down to read awhile. Presently he reached a line that leaped out because it had been underscored with a pen. Three words, Amen and amen, had been inked on the margin beside it. The line read:
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Jefferson, a Southerner and a slave owner, had been writing about slavery. What confounded Orry was the marginal notation. He had studied enough old plantation ledgers to recognize the handwriting. It was his father’s.
The three words suggested that Tillet, so staunch a defender of slavery in public, had actually harbored doubts about it. Doubts he had kept hidden all his life. The old sinner, Orry thought with a surge of sympathy. Well, what decent man wouldn’t harbor doubts—especially now that the consequences were so cruelly apparent?
Encountering Tillet’s doubts only enhanced his own, which were profound. They embraced both the history of the Mains and that of every man who lived by, and therefore tolerated, the peculiar institution. Ever after, Orry regretted that he had given in to the impulse to take that particular book off the shelf.
A few minutes after sunrise one misty morning, Orry and Charles went riding on the plantation. Pale clouds stirred around them as they galloped, phantom men on phantom horses in a landscape of gray shot through with smoky orange. Beneath the layers of mist, the flooded fields shone like polished metal.
A file of slaves trudging along a check bank loomed on the right. The driver turned to offer a laconic salute to the master. But even at a distance, Orry detected a certain mockery in the black man’s bearing, a certain resentment on his face.
Soon a swirl of mist hid the spectral column of men. But other parties of workmen were out that morning, and Orry realized he had been riding among them without taking note of their presence. They simply existed, like trunk gates or the kitchen building. They were items of property.
He thought again of Jefferson’s book. Items of property. That was it, wasn’t it? The reason the North, the world, perhaps even the Lord Himself, was calling the South to judgment—
“Wade Hampton’s raising a mounted legion,” Charles called suddenly. “I’m reporting for duty in two weeks.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I was only notified yesterday. I’m tired of waiting and fretting. I want to do what I was trained to do.” He leaped his horse over a ditch. His hair, badly in need of barbering, bobbed and danced at the nape of his neck. “It should be a glorious fight.”
The remark made Orry realize how great a gulf separated them. It was caused by more than a difference in their ages. Even after seeing action in Texas, Charles hadn’t lost his love of brawling.
Orry didn’t want his silence interpreted as agreement. “Glorious?” he called back. “I think not. Not this time.”
But Charles was already cropping his horse for greater speed, and he was laughing with such joy of life he never heard the dour voice behind him. Hair streaming, he went galloping toward the misty sunrise, the perfect picture of a cavalier.
Next day Orry received a letter from the state government. He hid it until evening, when he could discuss it with Madeline in the warmth of their bed.
“They asked me to consider a commission. Possibly a brigadier’s. Apparently the lack of an arm is no handicap at that rank, and they claim my former service makes me invaluable. Invaluable—imagine that.”
He laughed, but there was scant humor in it. Then: “Do you know, Madeline, years ago John Calhoun said West Point men would lead great armies? I don’t suppose he imagined they would lead them against each other.”
After a moment she said, “How do you feel about the proposal?”
He lay back and stroked her hair. “It’s tempting, but I’d hate to leave you here alone.”
“I’m not afraid of Justin.”
“It isn’t Justin who worries me. Have you noticed how some of the plantation people are behaving? They’ve gotten lazy. A few have an almost arrogant glint in their eye. This very afternoon I caught Cuffey whispering with another house man. I heard the name ‘Linkum.’”
She assured him she would be fine if he chose to leave. He thanked her, but he knew his decision would spring from something far more elemental. His land, Main land, was threatened now. Would he or would he not defend it?
“I’ll show you the letter in the morning,” he said. “I do believe I’ll have to give them a favorable answer.”
“I almost knew you’d do that when the call came.”
The call. The words touched off bursts of memory, the strongest of them aural. The old, nearly forgotten drums were beating again, summoning him, demanding that he answer.
“How would you feel if I accepted a commission?”
She kissed his mouth. “I’d regret it.” Another kiss. “And be proud.” A third, still longer and sweeter. “And wait for you to come back to me at the first possible moment.”
Her arms clasped him tightly. He didn’t think he’d ever been so happy. She whispered to him:
“I love you too much to lose you, my darling. If you go away, I’ll pray such prayers God can’t help but send you back safe and sound.”
Stanley’s crony, Boss Cameron, had secured a post for him in the capital. Washington was already showing signs of turning into a warren of profiteers, influence peddlers, and political hacks. But old, plodding Stanley was invigorated by the new challenge, and Isabel looked forward to an exciting social adventure. Stanley and his wife had already closed their house and enrolled their boys in a fashionable Washington school. At fourteen, the twins were undisciplined ruffians. Their absence would be welcomed by the entire town of Lehigh Station.
Up in Rhode Island, a violent storm destroyed a large section of roof at Fairlawn. George received the news by telegraph and decided to leave by train the next day to assess the damage. Constance said she wanted to go with him. She needed a holiday; she was peeved at the world and inexcusably short-tempered with William and Patricia. Brett and Billy promised to look after the children, since Billy hoped to be at Belvedere a few more days before returning to duty.
That night, after a lengthy meeting he had called in his office at Hazard’s, George found himself unabl
e to sleep. By eleven-thirty he was in the library, a full tumbler of whiskey before him on the polished table, six inches to the right of the rough brown object he had treasured for so many years.
He stared at the meteorite a long time, finding himself less proud of his trade, less certain of its worth, than in the past. He saw all the destructive uses to which star iron had been put throughout the centuries, and to which it would soon be put again. He finally drank the whiskey around three in the morning, and extinguished the lamp and climbed to his bedroom and the warmth of his wife’s slumbering form, but even then he failed to find rest.
Newport had a dead, abandoned look under gray skies. George and Constance felt strange staying in the great house all by themselves. Yet at the same time they relished their unfamiliar privacy.
On the afternoon of their first full day at Fairlawn, George met for an hour with the building contractor who would repair the roof. Then he and Constance went for a walk along the deserted beach. White combers were breaking. The sky had a vast, wintry look unsuited to springtime. She kept her arm in his, eager for the sense of contact.
“You never told me the reason for the night meeting, George.”
“Nothing secret about it. I called in all the foremen and told them we were placing the factory on a twenty-four-hour production schedule. We’re already receiving orders from the War Department. No doubt Stanley will see that we get many more. We’re liable to come out of this richer than ever.”
“At the price of a certain number of dead bodies.”
He frowned. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
He stopped and turned toward her. He had to get something into the open. “Stanley says Washington wants all the Academy men it can find.”
“For the Army?”
“Or government posts.”
